By Sean Dillon — There are times when you can pitch a comic to someone with “It’s X artist doing their thing” and not need to say any more than that. Whether it’s “Grant Morrison is writing a Superman comic,” “Raina Telgemeir is writing about a teenage girl,” or “The Comics Journal is writing a piece about Grant Morrison” you always know what you’re in for. However, while I Want You can certainly be described as “Lisa Hanawalt is doing absurdism with humanoid animals,” it is not what you would expect.

Stylistically speaking, it does not look like Hanawalt’s more modern work. Sure, the introduction evokes Tuca and Bertie’s cartoonish sincerity where the characters look like rubbery versions of the animals they’re meant to be, but the majority of the book takes on a more realistic style. The animal heads look like realistic depictions of actual people with animal heads. Even the humans in this collection don’t feel like the humans of Bojack Horseman, instead offering an almost grotesque realism. There are some moments where Hanawalt goes for a more abstract style, but it never reaches for the excesses of her later work.

Furthermore, while her later series would rely on the dry wit of the characters or the absurdist freedom of animation, I Want You is a book that revels in the silence of comics. There are frequent sets of pages that are simply silent interludes of characters dancing, walking, or simply living their lives. These full page spreads of still life offer an extension to the book’s sense of absurdist reality.

Of course, what really shines through reading the book is Hanawalt’s sense of humor. From Things We Are Sorry We Did Last Night’s sequence dedicated solely to the author murdering all the people who are named “Lisa Hanawalt” to the inevitable punchline of The Faux Jack-Off: A Thing You Can Do While Driving to the porn parody titles in Shopping with She-Moose (my favorite is Deep Stoat), the book is jam packed with moments of delightful comedy. But perhaps my favorite comedic moment is the punchline of Top Causes of Freeway Accidents.

Equally, there’s a sense of melancholy to I Want You. It’s not often expressed verbally or even visually, but the use of realism typically makes the various characters look sad and lonely. In one of the moments where this is more pronounced, we watch as two people fail to have sex. We’re not allowed to see their faces above the snouts, but we can feel the desperation and sadness within. The feeling of being unable to go through with one’s desires no matter how right it feels and the subsequent alienation it causes.

That’s ultimately the effect of the realistic drawing style Hanawalt utilizes for I Want You: alienation. It distances us from the experiences depicted within the text that inexplicably draws us closer in to the events. The distance only highlights the emotions meant to be evoked by the collection of short pieces. It’s clearly the early work of an artist who would go on to do better things. It never reaches the highs of Tuca and Bertie or Bojack Horseman, but it’s still an amazing text full of heart, humor, and occasional melancholy.

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: I Want You by Lisa Hanawalt

I Want You By Lisa Hanawalt
Creator: Lisa Hanawalt
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Before the critically acclaimed animated shows, the bestselling graphic novel Coyote Doggirl, or the humor collections Hot Dog Taste Test and My Dirty Dumb Eyes, cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt was a comic book industry sensation with her Ignatz Award-winning minicomic series I Want You. Hanawalt’s outlandish humor and ingenious formalism are evident in the comics collected here. Her love of anthropomorphism and scatology are on full display, all lovingly and grotesquely drawn by Hanawalt in obsessive, unnerving detail.
The stars here are She-Moose, who we join sex-toy shopping, and He-Horse, who we learn mid-flight suffers from ornithophobia. The true star of I Want You may just be Hanawalt’s hilarious command of the graphic listicle. “Top Causes of Freeway Accidents” is a prescient pre-BoJack display of Hanawalt’s love for all things equine. “Things We Are Sorry We Did Last Night” includes the murder of all Hanawalt's Google doppelgängers. Whether she’s discussing the daily commute or masturbation, she packs each comic in I Want You with punchy cultural observations and sharp-witted reflections on typically taboo subjects. A master humorist and cartoonist, Hanawalt strikes the perfect balance of drawing the gorgeous and the repugnant, the fantastical and the lifelike, the bizarre and the hilarious–creating a deeply human experience that everyone can relate to.
Release Date: August, 2020
Price: $21.95
More Info: I Want You by Lisa Hanawalt

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Sean Dillon is a writer/editor for a number of publications, including PanelXPanel, Comic Book Herald, and several others. He is also the author of the book One Must Imagine Scott Free Happy and The Tower Through The Trees. His main blog is http://thekinginredandblue.blogspot.com and his Patreon is http://patreon.com/seandillon. He can be found on most social media outlets @deathchrist2000.